A website migration keeps its search traffic when every old URL redirects permanently to its closest new equivalent, the new site keeps the content, titles, internal links and structured data that earned rankings, and the launch is monitored closely for crawl errors and lost pages. Most traffic losses after a redesign, platform change or domain move come from missing redirects, content removed without replacement, staging settings left on, or blocked crawling. The checklist below covers the work before, during and after launch.
Types of migration and their risk
| Migration | Risk | Main concern |
|---|---|---|
| Redesign on the same URLs | Lower | Content, templates and internal links changing |
| Platform change, such as WordPress to Next.js | Medium to high | URL patterns, rendering, metadata handling |
| URL structure change | High | Complete redirect mapping |
| Domain change | High | Redirects plus Search Console Change of Address |
| HTTP to HTTPS | Lower if done cleanly | Site-wide redirects and consistent canonicals |
Before launch
- Crawl the old site completely and export every URL, title, meta description, H1, canonical and status code.
- Export from Search Console and analytics the pages with clicks, impressions, conversions and backlinks. These are the pages you cannot afford to lose.
- Build a redirect map: every old URL to its closest new equivalent, one to one. Redirect to the home page only when nothing relevant exists.
- Keep the content of important pages. If you rewrite them, keep the topics and questions they ranked for.
- Carry over titles, descriptions, headings, internal links, image alt text and structured data.
- Check the new site renders its main content in the HTML; test with our AI crawler access checker.
- Protect the staging site with a password, not only with noindex, so it is never indexed.
- Crawl the staging site and compare it with the old crawl: missing pages, changed titles, broken links.
- Prepare the new XML sitemap and the robots.txt for production.
Launch day
- Deploy redirects together with the new site, as 301s, without chains.
- Remove staging noindex tags, password protection and robots.txt disallow rules from production. This is the most common launch mistake.
- Test the redirect map automatically: request every old URL and confirm it returns a 301 to the right target, which returns 200.
- Submit the new sitemap in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- For a domain change, use the Change of Address tool in Search Console and the site move tool in Bing Webmaster Tools.
- Check analytics and conversion tracking are firing on the new site.
After launch
- Monitor Search Console daily for two weeks: Page indexing, crawl stats and 404s.
- Check server logs for Googlebot requests to old URLs and their responses.
- Compare clicks and impressions for the important pages against the pre-launch baseline.
- Update internal links to point directly to new URLs, instead of relying on redirects.
- Ask the sites with your most valuable backlinks to update them.
- Update your URLs on Google Business Profile, social profiles, directories and in your Organization schema’s sameAs list.
- Keep the redirects in place long term; Google recommends at least a year, and there is little reason to remove them.
What to expect
Google says rankings may fluctuate while it recrawls and reindexes a moved site, and that a medium-sized site can take a few weeks for most pages to move, with larger sites taking longer. A well-executed migration usually recovers to its previous level. Sustained losses after a month point to missing redirects, removed content or technical errors.
AI search after a migration
AI assistants may keep describing your old URLs, old services or old company details for a while. Redirects handle the links; consistent new details on your site, profiles and directories handle the descriptions. If you changed domain, make sure AI search crawlers are allowed on the new domain’s CDN and firewall, since new CDN setups often block them by default.
Frequently asked questions
Can we redirect everything to the home page?
No. Google treats mass redirects to the home page as soft 404s. Redirect each URL to its closest equivalent.
Should we change the design, platform and URLs at the same time?
Fewer simultaneous changes make problems easier to find. If URLs must change, keep content and structure as stable as possible for the first weeks.
How long should we keep the old domain?
Renew it indefinitely and keep the redirects running. Losing the old domain breaks every old link.
Sources
- Google Search Central, “Site moves with URL changes” and “Change of Address tool”
- Google Search Central, “Redirects and Google Search”
- Bing Webmaster Tools, site move documentation